Mohammed Morsi’s ouster as president certainly created new challenges for Egypt. But it’s also created a dilemma for President Obama.

The reason? We have a law that prohibits sending US aid to any nation whose leaders came into power via a military coup. That’s one reason the Obama administration has been so reluctant to call what happened in Egypt this month a coup. If it did, it would tie its hands with regard to the $1.3 billion in military aid and $250 million in economic aid we send to Egypt each year.

Elliott Abrams, a former National Security Council official under George W. Bush and assistant secretary of state under Ronald Reagan, argues that the best thing we can do to promote respect for the rule of law in Egypt is to follow that principle here. In The Weekly Standard, he put it this way:

“Now, there are good coups and bad coups, coups we like and coups we don’t like. But it seems very clear that Morsi won the presidential election, and whatever point public opinion reached in Egypt he was removed by the Army — not by impeachment and not by a revolution. A ‘duly elected head of government’ was ‘deposed by military coup or decree.’ So the issue is whether to respect our law.”

That sounds right. Plainly, the United States has an interest in helping the Egyptian people achieve stable, representative government. But the first step here is abiding by our own laws, not pretending that what happened in Egypt never occurred.